The Knepp estate in West Sussex is home to the first white stork born in the wild in Britain for over 600 years. It’s a place where endangered bats, turtle doves and nightingales are thriving, where “officially extinct” large tortoiseshell butterflies are breeding and where tens of thousands of people visit each year to experience “a story of hope” about the resilience of nature in the face of the global climate emergency.
There have been many exciting changes at Knepp since 2018, when Isabella Tree wrote Wilding, her award-winning book about rewilding an unprofitable 3,500-acre arable and dairy farm. Now she has written a captivating illustrated book, Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back – An Illustrated Guide, updating her readers about extraordinary developments at Knepp and offering practical advice about rewilding their own spaces, however small.
Dry land wheat at it’s extreme follows does what is called chem/fallow and no-till.
This is where they only grow a crop every 2 years. They then let the soil moisture build up in between with a fallow year and spray out anything growing.
The yields average around 40bu/acre every two years. In the same areas if they irrigate the wheat, they get 150-200bu every year. So up to 10x higher yields
Because of the lower input per acre, they can claim a lower carbon footprint with the calculations. All while doing up to 10x the amount of habitat loss.
Where were you when I was doing a research project on wheat!? I’m not based in agriculture science at all, but supposedly, wheat in South Africa has the lowest carbon footprint in the world, but we still didn’t recommend that the client used wheat from S. Africa because it didn’t seem sustainable and the yields were low. I had no idea it was that bad, though.
Depending on how long ago, I was likely on a plane traveling the globe visiting farmers on every continent.
FYi South Africa yields are a bit better than the example above. 35bu/acre every year dryland. Of course irrigated in the same region is 115bu/acre.
The only reason the above example still exist is because of government subsidies.